different between belly vs wame

English

Etymology

From Middle English bely, beli, bali, below, belew, balyw, from Old English belg, bælg, bæli? (“bag, pouch, bulge”), from Proto-Germanic *balgiz (“skin, hide, bellows, bag”), from Proto-Indo-European *b?el??- (“to swell, blow up”). Cognate with Dutch balg, German Balg. Doublet of blague. See also bellows.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /?b?li/
• Rhymes: -?li
• Hyphenation: bel?ly

Noun

belly (plural bellies)

1. The abdomen, especially a fat one.

   (Can we find and add a quotation of Dunglison to this entry?)

2. The stomach.

3. The womb.
4. The lower fuselage of an airplane.
   • 1994, Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom, Abacus 2010, p. 454:

     There was no heat, and we shivered in the belly of the plane.

5. The part of anything which resembles the human belly in protuberance or in cavity; the innermost part.
6. (architecture) The hollow part of a curved or bent timber, the convex part of which is the back.

Usage notes

• Formerly, all the splanchnic or visceral cavities were called bellies: the lower belly being the abdomen; the middle belly, the thorax; and the upper belly, the head.

Derived terms

Descendants

• Sranan Tongo: bere

Translations

See also

• abdomen
• bouk
• have eyes bigger than one's belly
• stomach
• tummy

Verb

belly (third-person singular simple present bellies, present participle bellying, simple past and past participle bellied)

1. To position one’s belly; to move on one’s belly.
   • 1903, Jack London, The Call of the Wild, Chapter 7,^[1]

     Bellying forward to the edge of the clearing, he found Hans, lying on his face, feathered with arrows like a porcupine.

2. (intransitive) To swell and become protuberant; to bulge or billow.
   • 1890, Rudyard Kipling, “The Rhyme of the Three Captains,”^[2]

     The halliards twanged against the tops, the bunting bellied broad,

   • 1914, Theodore Roosevelt, Through the Brazilian Wilderness, Chapter 6,^[3]

     There were trees whose trunks bellied into huge swellings.

   • 1917 rev. 1925 Ezra Pound, "Canto I"

     winds from sternward

     Bore us onward with bellying canvas ...

   • 1930, Otis Adelbert Kline, The Prince of Peril, serialized in Argosy, Chapter 1,^[4]

     The building stood on a circular foundation, and its walls, instead of mounting skyward in a straight line, bellied outward and then curved in again at the top.

3. (transitive) To cause to swell out; to fill.
   • c. 1601, William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, Act II, Scene 2,^[5]

     Your breath of full consent bellied his sails;

   • 1920, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street, Chapter I, I,^[6]

     A breeze which had crossed a thousand miles of wheat-lands bellied her taffeta skirt in a line so graceful, so full of animation and moving beauty, that the heart of a chance watcher on the lower road tightened to wistfulness over her quality of suspended freedom.

Derived terms

• bellying
• belly out
• belly up

English

Etymology

Northern form of womb, from Old English wamb.

Noun

wame (plural wames)

1. (Scotland, Northern England) The belly.
   • 1932, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song, Polygon 2006 (A Scots Quair), p. 26:

     everybody knows what they are, the Gourdon fishers, they'd wring silver out of a corpse's wame and call stinking haddocks perfume fishes and sell them at a shilling a pair.

2. (Scotland, Northern England) The womb.

Anagrams

• meaw

Middle English

Noun

wame

1. Alternative form of wombe

Scots

Alternative forms

• wam

Etymology

From Middle English wambe, wame, wamb, forms of womb (“belly, womb”), from Old English wamb (“belly”).

Noun

wame (plural wames)

1. belly
2. womb
3. (figuratively) heart, mind
   • 1817, Walter Scott, Rob Roy (in English and Scots):

     "why, Andrew, you know all the secrets of this family.". "If I ken them, I can keep them," said Andrew; "they winna work in my wame like harm in a barrel, I'se warrant ye."